Digital economy is honest governance: Ravi Shankar Prasad

New Delhi, Dec 25 (IANS) Urging people to switch to digital methods of payment, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad on Sunday said digital economy is honest governance.

“Digital economy is honest governance,” he said referring to the unaccounted parallel economy that largely flourishes on cash.

Speaking at an event here to launch ‘DigiDhan Yojana’ to popularise cashless transactions, Prasad said the government is working towards making digital transactions using Aadhaar number easier.

“Aadhar is unique to India. Now, we are going to make payments through Aadhaar still easier,” Prasad said.

He said that as many as 109 crore people in India have Aadhaar card, and around 35 crore people use smartphones.

The Minister explained that one can pay for groceries and other things by just using a small fingerprint scanning device and a smartphone.

“You don’t need to have a smartphone to purchase things. The small device would attach to the shopkeeper’s smartphone. You just feed your Aadhaar number and put your finger on the device and the money would be paid,” he told the audience.

The first lot of 15,000 winners of the Lucky Grahak Yojana was also made public at the event.

The winners, who made digital transactions between November 9 and December 21 using RuPay, UPI, AEPS or USSD code, would get the prize money credited directly to their bank account.